New World reached the top of the Steam's player charts in during its first weekend, beating out multiplayer giants Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. New World is Amazon Game Studios' new MMORPG where players find themselves shipwrecked on an uncharted island rife with supernatural forces. The game heavily borrows from mid-seventeenth century aesthetics as inspiration for its locales. Prior to its release, it had a successful beta in June, reaching over 190,000 concurrent New World players in its first day.
When New World's beta hit Steam during the summer, many players were quick to criticize the game's lack of polish, such as server instability or causing high-end GPUs to brick. While technical problems are par for the course in any beta, Amazon Game Studios aptly responded by pushing the game's release date back a near full month to focus on the aforementioned polish needed. In the face of these setbacks and delays, this doesn't appear to have deterred players from buying the game on release, nor has it tarnished its reputation: the new MMORPG is so popular that the developers have locked players out of creating characters on crowded New World servers.
NME reports that New World saw over 913,000 concurrent players in its opening weekend, putting it at the #1 spot on Steam's player charts. This means that the game sat above games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which consistently sit at the #1 and #2 spots on any given day of the week. It would seem that this success is unprecedented due to the queue times on every server - although, the developers are taking action to combat the issue by implementing systems that detect inactive players. Another solution they are providing is the option for players to swap servers if they are bogged down by long queues.
One thing that New World's success has signified, however, is a comeback for MMORPGs. For quite some time now, MMORPGs seem to have been considered a dying landscape, with only a few games keeping it alive. New World marks the first AAA MMO release in years. With Final Fantasy XIV continuing to increase in popularity and New World adding to the genre, fans are now experiencing a resurgence in the genre's popularity.
It is worth noting that many new releases often see a surge in player count during a release window due to anticipation, and New World is no exception to this rule. It will be interesting to see if it can maintain this count once settling into a routine, as is conventional for any live-service game or MMORPG. Most games like New World will see a pattern where player counts spike when new content is released, and then drop into a lower population number that hangs there until its next content release. That said, what the game has achieved in just its opening week is a great sign for New World's player population, and suggests continued success.
New World is available on PC.
Source: NME